


darling, what's it for?

by SafelyCapricious



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-14
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-12-15 02:51:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11796897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/pseuds/SafelyCapricious
Summary: It isn’t common.It happens, but it isn’t common.It’s been the subject of great romances and terrible tragedies.This is probably one of those.





	darling, what's it for?

**Author's Note:**

> For sapphireglyphs request on tumblr: Ward x Simmons for the “I didn’t know you could sing.” (either an arranged marriage au or a soulmate au please! :D)
> 
> This is...probably not what you'd hoped for? I'm sorry. This has been a monster for me though, and I'm very pleased to be done with it.
> 
> In other news, I'm trying to catch up on comment replies, so if you start getting a bunch of those from me, uh, sorry it took me so long? I love you.

It isn’t common.

It happens, but it isn’t common.

It’s been the subject of great romances and terrible tragedies.

Jemma remembers the first time she saw Hamlet. Saw how Ophelia had just accepted that although she had his name on her breast, hers didn’t likewise adorn his and never would. She was only seven, but she’d watched the anguish on the actresses face and had simply thought, “ _Oh_.”

Her nana was incensed when, upon asking Jemma if she was excited to meet her soulmate, the little girl had responded, “Oh, I’m just like Ophelia, nana. But don’t worry, I’d never hurt myself. I have science.” (Nana had blamed Jemma’s mother, whose own soulmate was an aromantic asexual – aunt Blair was always around the house, but Jemma’s mum was in love with her father – and the fight had been loud and dramatic and terrible.)

There was, of course, no way for Jemma to actually know for sure – but at seven she was already absolutely positive it was true.

Her soulmate’s name doesn’t adorn the top of her breast, like that of Ophelia, where it was readily visible due to the plunging neckline of her nightgown when she went to her watery death. No, his name curves into the flesh of her breast, underneath. Easy to hide with clothes. Which she appreciates, because she knows, somehow, that he is never going to be hers but she doesn’t want anyone else to ever know.

Once she starts to date she keeps bandaids in her purse, and uses concealer there, staining bras and shirts alike over time. If any of her boyfriends think it odd how she enthusiastically appreciates their attention to her right breast, but flinches and pushes them away when they try to so much as caress the left, they never comment.

So she’s not disappointed when Grant Douglas Ward doesn’t show a hint of recognition when she purposefully uses her full name to introduce herself. There’s a pang in her heart, but she’s been expecting it and she doesn’t even break when Fitz shoots her a confused look.

She’s not expecting how much she wants to know who his soulmate actually is though – and she does. She wants to know his or her name, and she wants to meet them more than she can possibly say.

Of course, he’s a specialist and they are especially paranoid about keeping their marks covered, and when she does get a chance to see it she’s almost traumatized enough not to take it in.

It actually takes her a minute, sitting shivering on the boat, soaked through, to realize that the dark she can see where his shirt has ridden up is not, in fact, hair, but rather where paint has washed off and she can see a name curling around the bottom of his abdomen.

Kara Lynn Palamas.

She only allows herself a moment to see _Kara’s_ name on his skin before she’s catching his eye and nodding down – he sees what she means immediately and covers it up with a frown. She averts her eyes and lets herself shiver and shake and not think; falling into the numbness that feels like it’s so much more than cold.

He tries to bring it up, awkwardly, while comforting her later.

“Look, uh, Simmons – I know you saw but – it’s – you know as a specialist I –“

She lays her hand against his arm and smiles up at him. She’s oddly proud of how pretty he is – she knows she has no power over it and it’s not really something that’s taken into account with soulmates, but he’s painfully pretty and looking up at him she’s struck anew by just how breathtaking he is. “It’s okay, Ward. I may not be that kind of doctor, but I will take your confidentiality in this very seriously.”

He smiles, nerves flowing away, and she feels her heart lurch like it always does when he sincerely smiles. “Thanks Simmons, if you ever want to tell me your soulmate, to make us even…” he stops speaking at her full body flinch, and then rubs her arm and speaks softer, “Sorry, that was a bad joke. Thank you.”

She smiles and forgives him – of course she forgives him. She thinks she would probably forgive him anything when he speaks softly to her – and he makes a joke at his own expense and –

Kara Lynn Palamas is a very lucky woman. Jemma has no intention of every telling her that, because she refuses to put herself even peripherally in their eventual relationship, but she hopes the woman realizes it regardless.

She hopes so at first.

Then she hopes the other woman never has to be exposed to _him_.

Jemma has been frustrated before, when the results of a study or experiment weren’t what she wanted – but she’s always accepted the truth when she sees it. Always.

This can be no different.

And yet, as she stares down at the body of agent Koenig, she can feel denial welling up in her throat. ‘No, no, no, no,’ she thinks.

But she can see the truth and she has to tell them – tell the team.

His name burns under her breast.

She was never Ophelia, she was never going to die of pinning, but she might, she thinks, be Jane Eyre. Only instead of her soulmate keeping _his_ insane soulmate wife in the attic, hers is a _murderer_. And a liar. And probably a million other worse things that she cannot even think on.

“Simmons?” Coulson prompts her and she startles.

She thinks she might be having an out of body experience as she lifts her head and looks at all of them clustered around and chokes on the words. “It’s – Ward. Ward did this.” It’s like she’s watching a play – a tragedy – only instead of Ophelia or Antigone or Blanche it’s _her_.

She’d thought, her whole life she’d thought, that her burden would be a soulmate who didn’t have her name. Now she realizes how much worse it could be – how much worse it _is_.

Numbness descends and she doesn’t try to fight it. Everyone else is equally horrified, but they hardly have time to feel it – rushing off to rescue Skye as they must, and her discomfort slots so neatly into theirs that no one notices that it’s any different.

She doesn’t let them realize that it’s any different.

Not everyone accepts the truth as easily as she forces herself too.

Fitz tries to convince everyone that it couldn’t have possibly been Ward – not really. That something else must be going on.

She wants that to be true so much she can taste copper in her mouth, but that doesn’t make it true. She’s never been an optimist and this truth – Grant the traitor, Hydra-Grant – rings true in the same way her soulmate not having her name rang true.

Jemma doesn’t realize that some part of her is still hoping she’s wrong though, not until he’s threatening her and Fitz and she feels the bottom drop out of her stomach long before he drops them to the ocean floor.

And somehow her heart sinks lower than the pod, and it doesn’t come back up. She feels like she’s moving through molasses as she swims, as she’s rescued, as she helps her team – her family – scramble to save what they can.

Nothing feels real anymore. She expected he wouldn’t _love_ her. She didn’t expect he’d try to kill _her_.

The numbness – the out of body feeling – the surreal tilt to the world doesn’t wear off once he’s been captured and locked up. She hasn’t even the heart to hope it might.

Grant – _Ward_ – is injured. (Of course he is, he fought against May.) And once she’s done patching up May, Coulson sends her down to treat the prisoner.

They knock him out before she goes in – she doesn’t watch it happen, but by the time she’s gone down the stairs into the room he’s laying peacefully on the bed. He looks serene in his sleep and so much younger, even with the injuries and it _hurts_.

She doesn’t know the agent with her well enough to make small talk, Vincent something, so when she sets to stitching and examining injures she sings to herself – something inane from a children’s show she used to watch – to try to distract herself from the reality of it all, to try to keep herself from spilling confessions to the unconscious body of her soul mate.

He’s shirtless and his paint has worn off in patches, so she can see the name of _his_ soulmate staring up at her. She hopes the poor woman never has to meet him, that she can mourn the lack of her soulmate without ever having to be exposed to him.

“I didn’t know you could sing,” Trip says, and startles her so badly she almost stabs Grant – _Ward_ – with the needle.

“Oh my,” she exclaims, hand over her heart as she stares at him with wide eyes, “don’t do that!” Her heart is beating fast and reality is rushing in and she doesn’t know how or why it’s happening now and she wants to cry and scream and –

Trip is there. Trip is there and Trip is wonderful and she wishes that _he_ was her soulmate. Even if he didn’t have her name it would still be lovely to have someone so kind and caring and _wonderful_. If it was his name under her breast she wouldn’t ache like she was the one who betrayed the team.

He chuckles and waves the other agent away, taking his place at her side and assisting. She almost forgets that it’s Grant – _Ward_ – with Trip chatting away with her and she’s wildly grateful to him.

It doesn’t last. The pain rushes back in, once she’s finished patching up Grant – _Ward_ – and has made her way back upstairs, until that’s all she can feel, until she’s filled with it.

Numbness follows again. It’s the body’s natural reaction to a shock, to keep it functioning and moving, and just because she knows it doesn’t mean she doesn’t embrace the numbness because she doesn’t think she can continue on without it.

She’s numb and hazy and fuzzy and the only thing that works is focusing on her work until she’s so exhausted she can’t think of anything but the bare facts that are laid before her.

It doesn’t help to know that he’s right beneath her. It doesn’t help that she cannot help but watch him on the video sometimes. Her beautiful, cruel soulmate.

She thinks the numbness may never go away, and then he does the unthinkable.

“I’ll only speak to Skye,” he says, face as soft as his voice, quiet like he doesn’t want to break the silence of the room as he breaks her heart.

It’s not that she wants him to be claiming to love her – it’s not – she resigned herself to that reality well before she knew who he really was. But Skye isn’t his soulmate. Kara is and – Jemma doesn’t want him, she _doesn’t_ , but if she who has his name on her can’t have him than at least the woman whose name he has, _should_.

It’s stupid to feel that way, she knows it is, but the feeling of unjustness cuts through the numbness and she feels _angry_.

How _dare_ he.

It starts to feed her rage, anytime she watches him, so making the decision to infiltrate HYDRA becomes easy. Coulson doesn’t even try to talk her out of it – or out of the fake soulmate tattoo she ends up getting. He doesn’t ask her what name she actually has, either, just accepts that she wants a fake one for her time undercover, and he holds her hand when she gets it.

William Thomas Jones curves across her left collarbone, when she’s done. It takes a few days to heal, hastened by SHIELDs healing cream, and she watches Grant in the Vault to help reaffirm her resolve.

Being undercover is both easier and harder than expected. She wonders, while she works at creating devices that could kill her friends with one hand and tries to steal and sabotage with the other, if this is why Grant is her soulmate; if this darkness that she’s finding inside of herself echoes his enough for him to be the only match for her soul.

It’s hard not to dwell on the implications of who her soulmate is, and what it means for her soul, now that she knows the truth of him. HYDRA is where she decides that the real reason that he’s her soulmate. It’s because he’s her responsibility.

It’s easy, from there, to see what she has to do.

He’s her responsibility, and she has to kill him.

She’s sure he doesn’t believe her, when she tells him, but he doesn’t understand. He _can’t_ understand.

It consumes her – which is good. Since Fitz is still acting strangely around her and everyone else is involved with their own concerns she has a lot of time to dedicate to her cause.

The betrayal of Bobbi and Mack, when it comes, is nothing to that of a soulmate, even one who doesn’t know she has his name on her body. She’s operating at a state of numbness that probably isn’t healthy but it’s become her new normal and –

When Coulson introduces Agent 33 as Agent Kara Palamas she has to brace herself against a wall. Kara is somehow both like and unlike what she’d thought Grant’s soulmate would be, and Jemma can see how well they fit together.

The rest of the team doesn’t know, of course, that Grant and Kara are soulmates, and Jemma isn’t planning on telling them. Partially because it’s clear they’re only treating Agent Palamas well because they’re so convinced she’s brainwashed, and partially because she’s actively planning to take away the woman’s soulmate and she’s ashamed.

She thinks that’s why, honestly, she hesitates when heading for him. The splinter bomb is in her hand and she has several moments to place it but she can’t. Kara might be just as misled as Grant, but she’s had trauma after trauma heaped on her and Jemma isn’t entirely sure she’d survive losing her soulmate.

Grant seems more amused than afraid, when she kills Bakshi instead of him. It’s a mistake on his part, because he thinks she hesitated for all the wrong reasons – he must have forgotten that she knows who his soulmate is. She wonders, as he aims his gun at her, if she is Ophelia. Not driven to suicide by lack of returned love from her soulmate, but destined to die because of him all the same.

He’d never know, is the funny thing, if he does kill her than he’d never know that his name curls under her heart.

In the version of the play she saw, Ophelia’s death was played as a catalyst for Hamlet and his downward spiral – would that be true of Grant, she wonders, or would he be completely unaffected? Is it the knowing that dooms Hamlet, or simply the fact that it was by his actions that she chose to die?

She wants him to suffer, she decides, if he kills her. But she still hesitates on the words – on telling him he’s her soulmate although she knows she’s not his.

He’s gone before she tries and she’s not sure if the feeling in her gut is relief or shame or something else.

It’s definitely guilt when they get Bobbi back, barely breathing and bloody and beaten.

Crisis after crisis and she can barely breathe and she’s staring at Fitz’s face as he tells her that even though he knows they aren’t soulmates he loves her more than any soulmate possibly could and she wants to laugh and cry and scream and –

It’s almost a relief, to be trapped on another planet, trapped in hell, because all of her everyday concerns are gone. She can’t worry about Fitz’s and her crumbling relationship, she can’t worry about Bobbi healing and Lance surviving, she can’t worry about how she keeps losing people she cares about – and she certainly can’t worry about her soulmate. She can only worry about surviving.

Will is…

Will is light in the darkness in a world without a sun.

She thinks, as she watches him sleep, that he is the reward she deserves for the hell the universe has put her through. And she’s not entirely sure she cares that they’re stuck out here, all on their own except for a ghost-monster, because it keeps the real world from intruding on this.

It’s the first time she’s tasted peace since before the uprising.

He describes his soulmate, Amber Ann Smith, as “I love her, sweet girl – hella gay,” and she can’t help but feel a rush of relief.

Jemma refuses to believe they won’t get off this hell planet, but she thinks that if he was going to be stolen away by his soulmate as soon as they got back she might sabotage it. It’s not a thought she’s proud of – it’s the kind of thought she’s sure Ward would approve of however – but it’s the truth and she won’t hide from it.

She tries to explain her situation to him, but finds herself softening it because the heartbreak in his eyes from just what little she manages to choke out is enough to suffocate her.

It doesn’t matter anyways. She has him and that’s what matters. She has him.

Until she doesn’t.

It’s bad luck – the sort that she thinks has been haunting her, her whole life, that the portal opens up right there and Fitz grabs her and before she can do more than scream she’s through it and Will is on the other side and – 

She doesn’t think she can ever forgive him for it, and she doesn’t care, this time, that no one is taking her side in this.

They rescued her, of course she should be grateful.

She would’ve gladly taken a short life on the hell planet with Will than this one without him – and she’s sure he’s dead.

He would’ve heard her scream.

And her stupid, loyal, _brave_ Will would have gone and tried to confront the monster and – 

Her heart is broken, her soul is fractured, no one understands and she’s not going to stop until Ward is dead.

He’s her responsibility and that thought is the only thing that’s keeping her on her feet.

“I’m going to kill you,” she tells him again, once he’s got her chained to a pole and is talking about her impending torture. She bares her teeth at him and she imagines breaking his neck.

He mocks and leaves so that Giyera can get down to business – and she laughs that he doesn’t even have it in him to stay and _watch_ – but then Giyera is opening her shirt because it’s “So much easier this way,” and she realizes when he’s staring at her brassiere with an open mouth that she hasn’t bothered to put makeup or bandaids on her mark since she’s been back and – “Grant!” he’s yelling before she can beg him to stop.

“Cute,” he says to her, then, “It’s fake,” to Giyera, she ignores the fact that it hurts to hear him say that, “she’s got two and this one is…“

He leans far closer than she wants him – peering at the name she got tattooed – and then he’s staring into her face with awe and –

She turns her face away, bile and spite and hate and love in her throat.

His hand curves over his name, without warning, and she jerks hard enough to wrench her wrists where they’re chained and the whimper that comes out of her throat is involuntary but it has Ward shushing her gently and then barking at Giyera to unchain her and – 

Giyera refuses, with is a relief because it forces Ward away from her and – 

She chokes on a noise – horror, she thinks – when suddenly Giyera’s brains are all over the room and on her pants and –

Ward – Grant – tsks in his throat before turning to her with a smile. She shrinks back against the pole – she’s going to try, when he lets her go, to use her shiv but she’s seen what Giyera can do and that he could get around it that easily –

Her task seems harder than ever.

“Sorry, babe,” he’s saying with a smile, “I’ll have you away from here before you wake up.” 

Of course he has an ICER. 

She has a moment to wish she _was_ Ophelia, really, because it would be so much easier than this – and then there’s a flash of blue and she’s gone.

**Author's Note:**

> My writing tumblr can be found [here](http://capriciouswrites.tumblr.com/)!


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